Social Status and the Application of Sanctions to Hypothetical Criminal Offenders

Abstract

Responses to hypothetical episodes of criminal acts from 523 adult respondents were used to test the proposition that persons react to criminal offenders and victims partially on the basis of class identification. Specifically, we hypothesized that persons would tend to recommend greater degrees of punishment to offenders who occupied class positions different from themselves and to offenders whose victims were similar to themselves. The data did not support the hypotheses.